As web-based e-commerce has flourished, website usage tracking has become an important tool for economic analysis. Traditionally, summary statistics including page views, click-throughs, purchase conversion (e.g., where a page viewer becomes a purchaser) and so on, have been compiled from a limited sample of web page visits. Statistics concerning customer and/or visitor satisfaction has also been acquired for websites. Typically a visitor may be offered some reward (e.g., discount coupon) in return for spending the time required to complete a satisfaction survey or a “focus group” may be retained to answer questions concerning a website. Thus, direct customer feedback concerning satisfaction level has been acquired. Conventionally, customer feedback data has not been collected from all website visitors.
Although websites are increasingly becoming crucial elements in corporate business models, traditional methods for measuring effectiveness in terms of revenue generation and customer satisfaction are limited. Thus, e-commerce site owners may have made decisions concerning their websites based on uncorrelated limited quantitative data and/or limited summary quantitative data. Additionally, these decisions may have been either completely objectively based on quantitative data or completely subjectively based on qualitative data.